Saturday, 8 November 2025

A Medal For Murder 2 (Pages 121 - 278)

 

SPOILERS!!!

We gradually discover that nothing is what it seems for the characters, and Kate starts revealing secrets.

When the captain asks Kate to investigate whether Lucy's disappearance is real, she checks her room and discovers a magazine inside which there is a page with cut-out letters. This means that Lucy sent the message to her grandfather, or there is the possibility that someone else put the magazine there. 

Kate then talks to Dylan, and from his answers Kate is aware that he is in the know of Lucy's whereabouts. The man tells her that the night before Lucy and Alison were on their way to Mrs Geerts, the other actress. When Kate goes to Mrs Geerts's and knocks, nobody answers, so she sneaks into the house through the kitchen window. Then she finds Alison in a nightgown at the foot of the stairs. The conversation that follows reveals that Alison is pregnant by Rodney Milner, and when Alison confided in Mrs Geerts, the woman told her that Mr Milner would never allow the marriage, and she would help her get rid of the baby. Kate tells Alison that she needs to be honest with Rodney, and she thinks everything will be fine.

In the meantime, Dylan cycles to see Lucy and tells her that her grandfather has asked Kate Shackleton to investigate, and the woman knows that the note came from her. Lucy refuses to give up when Dylan asks him to forget about her plan. She is certain that she will get her money. What Lucy does not know is that there is no inheritance. The captain told Kate that he simply told her about the inheritance from her parents to give her something to hope for, but Kate suspects that the man might have squandered his grandchild's fortune.

Dylan leaves the tower frustrated, and when he is cycling back to town, a car knocks him off and the driver abandons him there. Lucy has also had an incident. When she was peeing into a hollow in the floorboard, the key fell into it, which means she can't reach it and therefore, she is locked in. Frustrated, she climbs the stairs and trips and sprains her ankle. So now she is not only trapped in the tower but unable to move.

Kate visits Rodney Milner, who seems to know nothing about Lucy, but she discovers that he is really in love with Alison, so he tells him to go and see her. The young man agrees to do that.

Kate now suspects that there is something fishy about the captain. In the attic she finds that it is where the captain has his military paraphernalia, and there are two uniforms, one of a captain and one of a sergeant, and there is a box with photographs, but she has no time to see much more, because the captain appears, telling her to leave and he says that it was a bad idea to ask her to investigate. 

After this disagreement, Miss Fell, who used to be the captain's aun's companion and lives in the building, takes pity and gives her some tea. Miss Fell tells him that her employer left the house to the captain with just a small provision for her. She also tells her that Lucy's parents died in South Africa, him in an accident and her from typhoid, and the captain agreed to take the girl in. Then the woman admits that she is Mrs DeVries, the woman Kate came asking after who pawned a diamond ring to Mr Moony. The thing is that she feels ashamed of her poverty and that is why she gave a false name. Miss Fell says that she got the ring because she gave the ticket to Lucy and the girl retrieved it for her. Kate wonders if Lucy is the person who robbed Mr Moony or was in cahoots with someone.

A person who Kate also suspects is Dan Root, one of the tenants who is a watch mender. It seems the man has something to hide. Kate asks Miss Fell to entertain Dan Root, and also the captain so that she can have a look around his lodgings and the captain's attic room.

What Kate discovers in Root's rooms is a bible with the name Gideon Bindeman, which seems to be the man's real name. From the parts in the past we know that during the war the captain had a woman called Elizabeth Bindeman in a concentration camp, and he sent her to a prison, separating her from her children. This man could be Elizabeth's child.

And when Kate checks the photographs in the attic, she discovers one in which the captain is with his batman, Sergeant Lampton. The strange thing is that the sergeant seem to be Lucy's grandfather. She starts to think that the sergeant may have impersonated the captain all these years. We know that this is true. After the war, Sergeant Lampton had plans to run a tobacconist's and the captain was going to help him. Yet, he discovered that the captain's plans were different, and he had inherited a property in Harrogate and was going to leave him high and dry. So the sergeant killed him, suffocating him with a pillow in his bed. The next day he put on the captain's uniform, and there was a knock at the door. There was a woman at the door, who told him that the baby was Miss Griffith's, the teacher who the captain had an affair with, and the baby was his and Miss Griffiths had married a vicar and couldn't keep the baby. So this means that Lucy was the captain's daughter, not granddaughter, but the man who raised her was no relation to her, just her real father's batman. And we know that Mr Milner, who knew about the real identity of the captain, blackmailed him all these years, and the last thing he wanted was Lucy as his wife. Kate is close to finding out. Sykes arrives with his fingerprint kit, and he tells her that after consulting with Kate's cousin, the records say that the captain was single, so everything he told about his son and daughter-in-law dying in Africa is all a lie. 

I am curious to discover who killed Mr Milner. Was it the captain? 

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